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Thoughts on getting Triple Monitor Working

Hey all, currently I have a 1920x1080 desktop monitor as well as a Sony TV (which takes 1080 and downconverts to 720) hooked up to a 9800 GT Ultimate (the Asus frankenstein one).

I would like to add hopefully one or two more monitors to the mix.

My regular work is dealing with GIS 2D/3D openGL stuff but I game a little with mostly indie stuff. Most visually intense game I play is Oil Rush.

What is the most sensible way to go about this?

My understanding is there's the following options:

Xinerama with 2 cards

Nvidia Twinview with 2 cards

ATI Eyefinity

a GTX 295 to run 4 monitors

an NVS/Matrox

But I know Xinerama has limitations about 3D. Would this effect Oil Rush? How stable is it?
I could go Eyefinity but I have mixed monitors (one I might add is 1280x1024). Also, how good are the newest drivers on the 5770 and 6770 cards? I've had one ATI card about 8 years ago..

Or a GTX295. But I have a 650W PSU. I could underclock it but this seems silly.

I could also use an NVS but they seem massively underpowered and poor for games. Would adding one to my existing card using the rendering abilities of the 9800GT Ultimate with the display outputs of the NVS. So I could theoretically have 6 monitors with a quad NVS?

You can use two nvidia cards (adding another one to your existing Asus card if you still have an AGP or PCIe slot left), or a dual-GPU nvidia card like 295 to replace your Asus, and then configure TwinView in NVidia X Server Settings. That's probably the easiest way.

Dual GPU with displaylink is not yet really supported. I think it'll be xinerama only for current X server versions if you want to use screens connected to both displaylink and nvidia. Also you would require really cutting-edge code to get it working a bit.

It is possible to have 3 monitors with full acceleration using two NVidia SLI capable GPUs and BaseMosaic option. Some drawbacks exist though, so be sure to research thoroughly before spending any money. Until Kepler comes to lower end graphics cards, the only truly multi-monitor capable NVidia GPU is the GK104 in the GTX 680.

A cheaper alternative to the Matrox DualHead2Go/TripleHead2Go is the Zotac DP2HD (also available with mDP).

Eyefinity is limited to the same resolution for all monitors, but that only comes into effect when you want to game across them all. Having a desktop with mixed resolution is no problem.

Kepler supports up-to 4 monitors. But there's only gtx680 released and I really don't know are four monitors supported under linux and will lower end keplers support four as well...

I think the answer on both questions is yes. Nouveau already supports 4 monitors with the latest code (or attempts to support it) so it'll definitely be easily possible for the nvidia team given the amount of code that's shared with the Windows blob. Also we've no reason to think that low-end cards will lack the support, unless your card doesn't have 4 outputs (there also exist 680's with only three ports).